Introduction

In recent years, both policy scientists and policymakers have taken a growing interest in the role of knowledge in the formulation, implementation and regulation of policy. This burgeoning literature encompasses a striking diversity of ideas about what counts as knowledge, what different types of knowledge there may be and how they are to be observed empirically. Different approaches attend variously to: the source or derivation of knowledge (eg from experience or from scientific investigation); its epistemic content (ideas or information); the characteristics of those who have or hold it (administrative, professional or lay); or its function or purpose (agenda-setting or evaluation). The logic of such categorisations is usually implicit, and many categorisations seem to incorporate different logics within a single scheme. Each seems to be searching for some way of ‘capturing’ knowledge such that it may be researched and used.

In this chapter, we propose a new phenomenology of knowledge based not on who knows what, how or why, but on the forms that knowledge may take. Drawing a simple analogy with the three phases of matter – solid, liquid and gas – we argue that knowledge too exists in three phases, which we characterise as embodied, inscribed and enacted. Furthermore, just as matter may pass from one phase to another, so too can knowledge be transformed, through various kinds of action, between phases. After reviewing the literature on knowledge and policy, we elaborate this three-phase model in the third section of the chapter. We then conclude by discussing some of the implications of our perspective for future work, both in research and policy.

This model is intended as a prolegomenon to future studies. We do not imagine that it can answer some of the most important questions we might ask about the place of knowledge in policymaking. We say almost nothing about the content or meaning (in the propositional sense) of knowledge or, except in passing, about the way in which it is organised and how this might relate to questions of power and social ordering. By the same token, we set aside normative and prescriptive discussion of the relative status of different kinds of knowledge. Our aim is simply to provide a common observational language for talking about knowledge – for ‘knowing knowledge’, so to speak – as it is manifested in the world.